Technologies and Know-How

RT‐QuIC and PMCA are fast in vitro assay that can detect disease-specific biomarkers with high sensitivity and specificity thus enabling early and definitive diagnosis of Neurodegenerative Diseases. These two techniques enable the detection of minute infectious prion proteins (undetectable by current diagnostic techniques) in peripheral tissues (e.g. urine, blood, cerebrospinal fluid and olfactory mucosa) of patients in early stages of Neurodegenerative Diseases and can model the process of protein misfolding and aggregation in vitro.

The proprietary computational protocol - developed by prof. Laio - is capable to optimize the sequence and binding conformation of peptides that recognize with high affinity and specificity the structure of a selected molecule in any solvent environment. In silico design of peptides takes advantage of the growing computing power and the accuracy enhancement of binding affinity predictions to optimize from scratch peptides as binders of specific targets. Peptides can be designed specifically for the structural recognition of any organic molecule under any environmental conditions, which can be previously chosen and they can be used in biosensors (Cosmetics, Environment, Food Safety, etc.) in order to monitor and screen routinely and at a low cost the presence of the target molecule.

Molecular recognition of protein targets is one of the most fundamental approaches in medicine and molecular biology for obtaining valuable analytical information. Peptides as protein binders have become a valid option in the framework of protein recognition, due to their numerous advantages, such as the fast and low-cost synthesis, or their high stability and versatility. However, the optimization of peptide sequences is usually performed by panning immune libraries, followed by punctual mutations to refine the binding affinity, an expensive and time consuming methodology.